To date, renewable energy certification has been done primarily on paper or solely through the observation of generation yield (eg. Carbon credits, or renewable energy certificates abbreviated herein as “REC's”). For example, a guarantee of the origin of energy generated from a renewable energy generator may be created upon generation of the renewable energy recording the total renewable energy yield, and this guarantee of origin can be on-sold to buyers in a financial market, or over the counter. Such a generation yield may be combined with various other generation sources to serve a consumer load. In such a circumstance an auditor is often required to account for the energy certificates or guarantees, as the case may be, to safeguard the trade of these certificates.
Such a certification may be suitable where the market for trade of such systems is liquid and functional. However, this certification leads to reduced transparency of transactions where regions do not have standards established for trade of such guarantees of origin or renewable certificates. This certification as well requires that an auditor be appointed to verify and check the specific information associated with the generator, the information of the certificate or guarantee of origin, the metering scheme used for measuring the energy yield from the generator, and other technical matters associated with the generation. Moreover, this certification today does not accommodate for the analysis of actual consumption as coupled to generation on a contiguous power grid network which establish the supply and demand characteristics of an energy market. Moreover, more frequently today, energy consumers wish to make statements in respect of the relative renewable energy consumed, for example, claiming and/or certifying that they consume 50% or 100% renewable energy in respect of their energy use through renewable energy generators.
In addition to the above problems, the actual yield of an intermittent resource cannot be predicted at any time, and as well the actual use of energy of a specific load is unpredictable, wherein the load may ultimately be utilizing a certificate or guarantee of origin to make a statement on the contribution of clean energy to its usage. As such, establishing the trade of energy from intermittent renewable resources to date still lacks transparency, and requires multiple parties to audit the trade of these certificates even where market standards for the trade of renewable certificates exist. This is often done on the basis that generation credits are simply bought and added up retrospectively to equate to a historically observed nominal consumption.
Furthermore, sometimes the renewable, or intermittent, generators are also combined with various conventional energy sources and it is hard to characterize an actual blend of energy sources associated with the electrical consumption load.
Embodiments of the present invention seek to provide a method and system for facilitating auditing of power generation and allocation thereof to consumption loads and a method and system of certifying generation and consumption transactional pairings over a contiguous power grid network that seek to address one or more of the above problems.